


i don't want you (yes i do, yes i do)

by ammunitionist



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Could Be Canon, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, first venture into pacific fic pray for me boys, only not exactly, vague mentions of slash but it's pretty tame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-02-23 02:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23937421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ammunitionist/pseuds/ammunitionist
Summary: the war ends.some things do too.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton & Eugene Sledge, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	i don't want you (yes i do, yes i do)

“What do we do now,” Snafu drawls, slow, and there’s not even enough investment in the words to assign emotion to them. “What an idiot.”

Sledge just watches the retreating back of the lieutenant, awkwardly hurried to get away, to the tune of Burgie opening the bottle of liquor behind him. He can’t remember his name. It got to be like that a while ago, but there’s no use in remembering dates like that- so he can’t remember quite when he forgot, either. The world had gotten embarrassingly small once the Marines he knew started getting gone and the ones he didn’t care to know fell into step in their place. It was just footsteps next to him soon enough, ankles deep in muck and dragging forward like a beast possessed.

Burgie passes the hooch to Snaf behind him, the quiet, hollow sloshing of liquid the only indicator of life between the two. The fireworks in front of them easily top the sound of breath, of fabric shifting, of metal hitting metal in one form or another. The easiest way to feel alone is to let the noise around him drown out whatever's left of the lives beside him.

He doesn’t feel alone, though.

It's a different kind of emptiness.

Snafu taps him on the shoulder to pass down the liquor and Sledge obliges, tugging the pipe from between his lips to pull at the amber liquid. It barely burns when it goes down, tasting like very little but familiarity. After drinking off whatever hellish moonshine they got out here for months, it'll be a wonder if home's whisky ain't just like water.

He drinks, and he watches another not-shell explode in the black sky above.

It’s hard to remember what it was like the first time. If there was an exact first time, even. The nights became one thing on Okinawa, black and thick and punctuated only by mortars and gunfire. When there weren't either, there had to be something, so they chose each other. Breath was hotter and thicker than the air- and indisputably better than gunfire- so they poured it down each other's throats like it was bound to save them. Barely sex and definitely not love, it felt more like a rodential grasp for survival. They survived, so it seemed to have worked.

Sledge is almost surprised when Snafu pulls him aside, later, after the fireworks are gone and things are quiet again. Someone had popcorn- fucking  _ popcorn _ \- and he's still digging bits of it out of his teeth by the time he's being dragged into some shady corner of camp. It's not worth it to mention; Snafu's lips are already digging into his with a splitting force. He doubts the man would care anyway.

Eugene molds against Snafu's body easily, their torsos a complementary form weathered into place by repeated and dogged motion. It's their due after months of this, this thing, this strange surreptitious agreement. Snaf presses his thigh in roughly and the thoughts go blank in a sharp snap, like a wire cut somewhere in his brain. It doesn’t matter, this undertaking requires very little of his brain anyway.

The rock is cool to his back, slowly creeping in through the thin fabric he's not noticed for weeks now. Snaf is barely warmer, but he's warm enough, and Sledge pushes forward just to hear a strangled grunt at his throat. He picks his head up to force his lips back into Eugene's mouth, and Sledge welcomes it. He tastes like nothing because they taste the same, all grit and sandpaper and other unsavory things that the girls back home wouldn't understand. Not that there were any girls back home, not for him.

The thought leaves him as he palms clumsily at Merriell's face, his hand sliding down against rough skin that leaves his skin tingling.

Snafu needs a shave, he realizes, which immediately makes his heart race in something akin to panic. Snafu  _ always  _ needed a shave, they all did, but he noticed this time. Without the war, there's space to notice all of the things he had no time for before. There's space to notice- or, rather, acknowledge- that this is  _ wrong. _

__ Not wrong that Snafu's a man. He'd long since reconciled that facet of his taste, if not with his faith than with everything else. If God were going to hate him for anything, it had to be all the killing, not the hesitant approximation of love he'd imagined up for himself.

It's wrong for its purpose. Wrong for its execution. When they were dying, it was pause. Something else to do than lose their heads. Something to pull their bodies from the mire, ignore the dead body of a friend a few yards away.

Now that the bodies are all wrapped up and buried, it seems like the undertaking is simply trying to be something it isn't. He'd imagined love back home in Mobile, back when it was still shame. The body of someone loved, moving behind linen curtains, soft yellow light drifting in across his mother's fine china. He'd tried to imagine the body softer, curved, dressed in thin patterned rayon.

It always became firmer again, despite his best efforts. Efforts which halted entirely when he finally enlisted. Baptist guilt was best ignored when  _ Thou shalt not kill  _ seemed like a flat impossibility.

The early days, he'd close his eyes and imagine the body, the smile, the laugh of a boy who didn't exist yet. That stopped too, when he stopped really closing his eyes- about the same time he fell into Snafu. That wasn't love neither, and there were no linen curtains around to imagine him behind.

Eugene pulls away from Merriell, gasping, almost choking. He tastes like something now. Sulfur.

"What," Snafu says, slow and lazy, almost invested enough to be irritated. "Got somethin’ in ma' teeth?"

"No," He spits, honest, pushing the word from between his teeth like an expletive. "No, no, I just-"

"You just what? Don't go tellin' me you suddenly got a moral compass, Sledgehammer."

Eugene pushes him away, harder, enough for Snaf to stumble on the take. It almost digs sympathy out of his chest.

Almost.

"I don’t want to do this." he defends, albeit weakly. "I don't- I don't want you."

"Well, this is fuckin' news to me." Snafu stands back in the way he always has, minorly inconvenienced by fucking being alive.

Sledge doesn’t say anything. He can’t quite get it out, and he’s not sure what it would be if he could.

Snaf looks at him one last time before sighing and heading off in the vague direction of the tent they’re billeted in.

“Good night, Gene.” he says, and Sledge just stands there. It almost sounds like disappointment.

“Happy end of the war.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! this is my first attempt at fic for the pacific so we'll see how it goes. comments are always appreciated!


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